


You Feel Cold

by crowleyshouseplant



Category: Star Wars, Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-25
Updated: 2016-01-25
Packaged: 2018-05-16 02:50:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5810716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crowleyshouseplant/pseuds/crowleyshouseplant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leia returns to Tatooine and tries to believe in the goodness Luke had seen in their father, Anakin Skywalker.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Feel Cold

**Author's Note:**

> Note: Very brief mention of suicide ideation

One day, when you are tired from rebuilding a government and you are tired of people looking towards you for hope and direction, when you are tired of bearing an old world and now a new world on your shoulders, you go to the library (the one you helped rebuild, sometimes with your bare hands), and you pull up his name in the database: Anakin Skywalker.

But you knew him by another name, as Darth Vader. You feel cold, and you close your eyes as the words blur. 

Darth Vader.

Your eyes slide down towards your shoulder. You think you can still feel the ghost of his hand, there, holding you back from Alderaan.

You close your eyes, breath constricting in your chest, the old, old hurt that nobody talked about because they had always been too busy fighting, too busy running. There was no time for tears, something you had said once a long time ago.

You wipe the ones coming from your eyes away with something like impatience.

You are tired of thinking about Alderaan. You hate that some of the maps, old maps because new, accurate ones were hard to find, still had Alderaan on them. They are quiet reminders every time that Alderaan is gone.

Darth Vader hadn't given the order--you know it was Tarkin--but he didn't do anything to stop it. He had reigned you back, towering over you in his suit and his skull-like mask, and there was nothing you could do but watch. 

You remember him entering your cell, the torture droid hovering behind him like his own personal satellite, orbiting him from afar like the pain and hate he radiated from his lifeless, masked eyes. 

You switch the computer off. You don't feel like reading any more. You don't care.

He isn't--wasn't--your real father. Bail Organa was. You hold onto that.

Once, Luke tries to bring it up. You're eating with him. He wants you to be a Jedi, like him (like his father). You're not interested.

"There was good in him." Luke's voice is quiet. 

You feel your mouth harden in that thin straight line as you rise, slamming your fork down beside your plate before you leave him at the table. You hope there's something for you to do, to distract you from all of this.

Instead, you're at the library, and you learn more about the man who had become Darth Vader in pieces. He had been a slave on Tatooine before being brought back to Coruscant to be trained as a Jedi.

He was supposedly the chosen one, a character or prophecy and hope.

Your chest hurts again. You always have to keep turning the computer off. It's too much. You're afraid that if you learn too much about Anakin Skywalker you will feel sorry for him, sorry for Darth Vader, who had committed genocide against your entire planet. Who had chopped off your brother's hand. Who had hunted the rebellion without mercy. Who had hurt you so much.

He had been someone in love. Someone who kept secrets. Someone who was angry and you know that anger--you feel it too. You feel that anger towards the injustice you had been fighting against since you were a young woman, when you had still been a princess of Alderaan. You feel that anger when you think about Alderaan, the cold hard fist of it pounding against the walls of your body. When you remember Han in carbonite, the chain in your hands as you choked that slug, the one who had done all of that to you and yours.

Coldness seeps through you, making your eyes waters as you hold your wrists to them. 

You want to die.

You've thought it before. It's on refrain, ever since you were young. But you can't because you need to fight. You are always fighting and you wonder when you can stop. You wonder if you can stop.

Without telling anyone, you take an X-wing and leave. You could have asked Han to take you on the Falcon, but you don't want to do that. You want to be alone. You don't want to be anyone to anybody.

You let the droid fly the ship. You input the coordinates for Tatooine. The stars streak by, and when the droid whistles you awake, you're there, facing Tatooine's twin suns on the pale planet below.

You can already feel the thirst setting in as you get clearance to land in Mos Eisley. It's been a long time since you've been here, but it's familiar to you. You were here a lot when you were masquerading as a bounty hunter.

You're not that person anymore. You're no one as you pull your plain cloak closer around yourself as you rent a speeder. You go through the hills, engine spitting sand and dust in your wake. You ask for Owen Lars, and people signal a ward against bad luck--they'd point and you'd go on your way.

The farm is almost as Luke had left it, you think, as you climb from the speeder. Attacked by the empire, no one had touched it, afraid of retribution. The sand has filled in the empty doorways, buried what had once been his home under the dunes. You see the remnants of the moisture farm, the droids long dead as they fade under the sun.

You think that the graves are buried too, but you go to where you think they should be, and you kneel in the sand. You think about Shmi buried here, and you think that you've never known your mother or your grandmother, and you think of all the people gone from your life leaving you alone.

You are anguished. 

The sand grits through your skin and burns your eyes and throats. You should leave this place. You should never have come. What is the point of being here other than to stand where Luke stood, where _he_ had stood once a long time ago.

Kneeling in the sand, the dry desert wind combing through your hair, you try to remember. You try to remember Luke's eyes when he had returned after the destruction of the second Death Star, those eyes that had turned to look back over his shoulder so many times after the celebration of their triumph and the mourning of their losses--the strange dissonance after every battle. You did not follow his gaze, and you wonder now if he had seen his father--your father--our father. 

You try to remember when he had asked you about her mother--his mother--our mother. She had been sad, you remember. You know why now. You wonder if you carry your mother's sadness and your father's anger in you.

You don't want any of it. Resentment freezes through you as you rise and kick at the sand.

There is nothing for it, so you climb astride the speeder and get back in your X-wing. 

You thought, maybe, that coming to Tatooine would change, would help you feel towards you father as Luke did. You wonder if you would feel the same way if you had not been left behind. You wonder if it was Darth Vader's last jedi mind trick.

You don't tell Luke or Han where you had gone, but you think that Luke might know. You wonder if sand pours from your boot and your heart, the same way it does for him, and if he can see it filling you with its barren deserts. 

He has a power you always thought you could never have, but now you know the truth: it's a power you will never want.


End file.
